A comment on a recent issue in the modding community

Hi folks,

While I was on leave, a situation arose in the unofficial modding community, which caused some confusion and prompted a number of comments asking what our position is on this.

What are official vs. unofficial mods

These days, TaleSpire has official support for adding creatures and some level of functionality via Symbiotes. However, these are relatively recent additions.

Since the early days of the TaleSpire Early Access, there has been a cadre of folks using dll injection and other fun techniques to bolt unofficial extras onto the game.

This is fine by us. Building the things we want, the way we want, takes time. So the fact that people can add things we haven’t or won’t is grand.

The understanding, of course, is that they are operating in an active building site, and so the shape of the codebase can and will change under their feet. This is just par for the course in the modding world.

Our relationship with the unofficial modding community

This has worked well.

Early on, we worked together to add a flag that prevented errors from mods from being reported to our server. This saved us from chasing bugs that weren’t our fault.

From our side, we started running Betas before launching big features. This was explicitly in an effort to break less of the unofficial mods. The idea is that the unofficial modding community has a chance to find mods that may be broken and a little time to fix them before the features ship to the public.

We don’t always see eye to eye on priorities, but that’s natural. The core of our team got their start in game development by modding Neverwinter Nights, so modding is our history, and it’s something we value.

What happened in this case

The short version is that a modder decided to add a plugin that shows a UI claiming to be wiping the user’s hard drive.

They then added this plugin (which they titled a “social experiment”)  as a dependency to another mod of theirs that was already broken.

This meant that when regular players who use any of the thirty-eight affected mods pulled the latest updates, they would fall victim to this “jape.”

EDIT 2024-08-09: We have received feedback explaining that the Thunderstore count of 38 included mods that used to have a dependency on the mod as well as ones that still do. While we are not aware of a way to check what the count was at the time, we are comfortable saying it was less than 38. A quick check at the time of writing this update shows only around 20 mods listing the plugin in question as a dependency. Whatever the count was, it was enough to cause the provoking issue, and we stand by our desire to correct any way we contributed to the confusion.

After this incident kicked off, the modder switched the plugin so it no longer shows a fake erasing of the hard-drive, but instead criticizes the user.

What is our position on it?

It is a frustrating thing to see. This is not how we’d like any players to be treated. Whether they are a member of our community or not.

It achieved nothing of use while simultaneously wasting the time of the people it confused and those who came to support them.

It all seems deeply unnecessary.

What next?

We remain staunch supporters of people’s right to modify their games.

We are not going to disallow or disincentivize it just because of the (in our opinion) tactless and short-sighted actions of one person.

If people choose to use unofficial mods, they are still free to, but they should be informed about the risks involved.

With that said, innocent parties got tricked and came to us thinking TaleSpire was doing something to their machine.

This makes TaleSpire look bad and the community unsafe.

Our feeling is that we need to do a better job of publicly delineating the boundary between the officially supported mods and the unofficial ones. People can only make informed choices if they are informed.

To that end, we are going to do the following:

Clarify Terminology

Anywhere in the game where we use the term “mod” when referring to “officially supported modded stuff,” we will instead be using the term “community content.”

This has been on the roadmap for a while and is just a much better name for content like music (which is something you’ll be able to add in the future).

With this change, we can use “modding” for the unofficial stuff, and all the other community content is… well… community content!

For the sake of consistency, I’ll still use the more unwieldy phrase “unofficial mods” for the remainder of this post.

Add UI to indicate the use of unofficial mods

We could do a better job at this, so we will.

Of course, mods can mess with any of the game’s code, so they could remove any UI we add. But we’ve collaborated with modders on things like this before, and we will endeavor to do the same with this, too.

Move discussions and support of unofficial mods to the sites and servers of their respective communities

In the past, we had a private board on Discord for unofficial modders. This didn’t work so well, as it just meant there were semi-clandestine discussions about joining that board.

In the time since that board atrophied, we’ve seen discussions about unofficial mods all around the official TaleSpire Discord. This has been very convenient but has contributed to the confusion we’ve seen with less technical users about what is and isn’t supported by us.

Our position going forward is that unofficial modding is softly off-topic for the official Discord server.

We aren’t gonna be out here waving the ban hammer or anything, but we will be encouraging folks to take the chat and support issues to the respective servers of the mod’s creators.

As with our previous iterations, we'll keep an eye on what's working and what isn't and adjust accordingly.

Coda

We hope these tweaks to our approach will help going forward and that this post clarifies some of what happened.

You can reach out to us on Discord or support@bouncyrock.com if you have any feedback.

As always, we hope this finds you well.

Happy adventuring!